OnPoint by Keith Ng

Punchline: Big tobacco have hired the spin-doctors for the whaling lobby to astroturf as dairy owners to fight the tobacco tax.

Genius.

This came out of a blog post by Rory MacKinnon that various news organisations were citing press releases from the “Association of Community Retailers”, but none questioned who these people were.

According to their press release:

The ACR is a grass roots organisation, much like its predecessor, Stay Displays. It is funded from membership subscriptions and, through its part-time coordinators in Wellington, our members will be kept informed on a range of issues that affect how retailers do business,” Mr Gibson said.

Turns out, it's a really good question, with a hilarious answer. The ACR uses the same PO box as Omeke Public Relations, the firm established by Glenn Inwood. You may remember him from such news stories as:

Reports say Glenn Inwood's Omeka Public Relations company, which works for Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research, chartered planes in Hobart and Albany to track the Sea Shepherd's ship, the Steve Irwin, in December.”

Same PO box. So? Maybe the PO box lapsed. Maybe a pro-smoking group just happened to pick up an old PO box from a pro-whaling group.

The ACR works out of the same Thorndon office as SpinItWide.com. SpinItWide.com is registered to one Glenn Inwood. Among SpinItWide's clients are the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR).

So, humour me for a moment, and assume that this Association of Community Retailers is connected to the spin doctor for the pro-whaling lobby. Maybe dairy owners found the money to pay for Inwood's services. Maybe Inwood is letting them use his offices because he shares their belief that smoking is a worthwhile cause. Maybe he gets their mail for them because he's a helpful guy.

The Wikipedia page on Glenn Inwood says (emphasis added):

Inwood's firm, Omeka, also works for Imperial Tobacco New Zealand, Japan Fisheries Agency, Japan Whaling Association, Species Management Specialists, and the World Council of Whalers."

The page references Omeka's own website in 2005, which hosted content for Imperial Tobacco New Zealand. SpinItWide is pimping Imperial Tobacco press releases right now.

Then there's also Richard Green and Murray Gibson, founding members and spokespersons for the ACR. Presumably this is the same “Discount Tobacconist shop owner Richard Green” quoted by the Manawatu Standard, since he said all the same things as he said in his press release.

Oh and hey, Rory also pointed to the fact that the ACR came out of the Stay Displays campaign. Not only was that campaign also fronted by Green and Gibson, but they had support from SpinItWide in that campaign too.

Funny, funny story. I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about how much of the ACR campaign is driven by Inwood and staff. Nor would I want to speculate about any financial arrangements that Green and Gibson have with Inwood. And I most certainly would not want to speculate about any discussions that Inwood might have had with his tobacco-industry clients about the support he was providing for the ACR.

And if I wasn't speculating about the ACR, I wouldn't speculate about its predecessor, Stay Displays, either. Naturally, that would preclude me from speculating about any other organisations that SpinItWide.com has been helping.

I wouldn't, for example, have anything to say about the following organisations who use SpinItWide.com (emphasis added randomly, with no meaning implied):

* The New Zealand Association of Convenience Stores. Its "Premium Members" are: Cadbury, Coca Cola, Bluebird, Herbert Morton, Tip Top, Mars, Nestle, Streets, oh, and British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco.

* Lombard Finance & Investments.

* NZ Aged Care Association.

* Poutama.

* Te Ohu Kaimoana (The Maori Fisheries Trust).

* Facilitate Communications Ltd., on behalf of their clients. Its managing Director is Carrick Graham. He was the Director of Corporate & Regulatory Affairs for British American Tobacco New Zealand until 2006.

Just sayin'.

Honestly though, I hope these guys have a better comeback than Whaleoil.

Wikileaks has released footage from the video gunsight of a US Apache attack helicopter that fired upon and killed a group of people in 2007, including two Reuters journalists. One was wounded in the first round of attacks, and when a vehicle arrived to rescue him, that vehicle was fired upon.

You can see the full video here.

It's 20 minutes long, it explains collateral damage better than anything that uses the words "collateral damage".

Please, go watch it.

It's raw, and extremely intense. But it's also much more complex than any of the 10 sec cuts you see on TV, and I implore you to be measured in your judgement.

Yes, I think that the crew and their commanders failed catastrophically, and it lead to the death of innocent people.

They failed to follow their own rules of engagement for assessing threats and risk to civilians.

They fired upon a vehicle that was evacuating the wounded, and was clearly not a military target - which was inexcusable even before considering the children onboard.

And the military lied about it.

But.

Perhaps the crew really did think that there were guys with AKs and RPGs down there. If those people actually *were* a group of insurgents with weapons on their way to an ambush, would it look different? Is it possible for this to be a genuine, reasonable, yet catastrophic mistake?

Clearly, the crew and their commanders made the wrong calls, and other people paid for it with their lives. But there is a difference between a mistake, incompetence, and murderous intent; and there's a difference in applying this to a crew behind a guy and applying this to the entire army.

Things like Wikileaks connects us directly with primary material. It has the raw power that comes from unadulterated reality. But it puts the responsibility of interpretation onto us. I hope we take that responsibility seriously.

The rules of engagement - previously classified documents also provided by Wikileaks - are available here.

Here are some suggestions for things you should do before you propose a policy:

1) Look at the policy's economic impact. Try using traditional measures, like expected contribution to GDP, or number of new jobs it would create. Exotic measures like "probable aggregated mass of unobtainium in entire landmass of given geology at net present value" may not be the best measure of a policy's economic impact.

2) Based on its economic impact, cost the policy and assess its impact on Crown revenue. If you are unable to find the Crown, DON'T PANIC. The Crown just means the New Zealand Government. There's a good chance that you're sitting in the government RIGHT NOW. Blow the whistle you're wearing around your neck and a friendly helper from the Crown will assess the revenue impact of the policy for you.

3) If the person that arrives is wearing a hard-hat and holding a pickaxe, THIS IS NOT THE PERSON YOU WANT. This person may be a miner, a geologist or a dwarf. The words coming out of his or her mouth are about rocks. ROCKS ARE NOT THE SAME AS MONEY.

4) If the person gives you a report with NEW ZEALAND MINERAL INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION written on the front, BEWARE! Although they both have "New Zealand" in their names, the New Zealand Minerals Industry Association is not the same thing as the NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT.

5) For things that affect commercial investment decisions, or have ecological or reputational impacts, you might want to consider the long-term implications. This may be many years, or even many many years. That's very many years.

6) Sometimes, your friendly helper from the government might say that there are bad things as well as good things about your proposal. Sometimes, they call these things "costs", "risks", "downsides", "negative externalities" or "bad things". Listen carefully. If they use any of these words, you should ask them to come closer and explain them to you. Once they are very close, you must to hit them in the head until they stop making any noise. Find the green civil-servant recycling cube on your desk and stuff the body inside. This will safely remove all the bad things from your policy.

7) Remember, New Zealand is a democracy. Therefore, the government debates public policy rationally. Other people who debate public policy are just batshit hysterical insane.

Much of the hysterical noise around my modest proposals to licence P labs in residential areas is ignoring the facts about P’s role in the economy.

Responsible P manufacturing is not an oxymoron, and I've made it clear that should P labs be permitted in residential areas, and should those areas show viable demands for P and low enough overhead costs, only modest and socially responsible P manufacturing would ever take place.

As for suggestions that modest and socially responsible P manufacturing on a small portion of the New Zealand's residential area would be ruinous to New Zealand’s international reputation, the facts to date suggest nothing could be further from the truth.

Fact: There is already P manufacturing in residential areas

As at September 2009 there were 482 P labs already operating in residential areas. Many P labs were set up by the last Labour-led government.

Between 2000 and 2008 international tourist numbers to the country increased 37 per cent from 1,789,078 in 2000 to 2,447,208 in 2008.

You see? You see the non-linear correlation? If we had 20,000 P labs in New Zealand, we would get 100 million international tourists each year. With 500,000 P labs, every single person in the world would come to New Zealand.

Fact: P manufacturing in New Zealand is a $12 billion industry

2008 was a record year for P production in New Zealand. The industry has been growing strongly in recent years, driven by demand by that guy you went to school with who is now a giant P-head.

Fact: P is an important export industry for New Zealand

Well, okay, it's not. But that's only because of the RMA.

Fact: P manufacturing employs thousands of New Zealanders in high-paying, highly productive jobs

The P sector, including oil and crystals, directly employs about 2,000 people in New Zealand and thousands more indirectly.

Jobs in the P sector are highly productive. In the 2000-2005 period the P sector (including oil and crystals) returned an average $360,000 of GDP per full time employee, nearly six times the national average.

Workers in the P sector average an income of $60,000 per employee – over double the national average. This figure excludes contract and casual workers.

Fact: P manufacturing is far more productive than most other land applications

P manufacturing in New Zealand use an extremely small amount of land (around 100 hectares), less than 0.0015 per cent of our total residential area.

The productive value of that land is $9,623,281 per hectare. Dairy farming by comparison uses 2 million hectares of land with an export value of only $3,500 per hectare. If we converted all our dairy farms into P labs, we could buy China and pay America to deliver it while wearing a tutu.

Fact: P labs in New Zealand are New Zealand-owned as well as foreign owned

The largest P lab in New Zealand is owned by this guy on the dole, which practically makes him a state-owned enterprise.

Between 2000 and 2009 he made profits of $4.6 million and returned $510,000 to the Crown through GST on what he spent on prostitutes.

In fact NZ P rings have on average 57% local ownership compared to 43% overseas ownership.

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As I said at the release of my discussion paper on what we're doing in the weekend, New Zealand totally wants to get high and P has an important role to play in getting high.

Whether P plays any part delivering greater prosperity, security and opportunity for all New Zealanders by way of manufacturing it is up for discussion over the next six weeks. But don't call me this week or next week, cos I'm going to be, um, real busy and shit.

(Inspired by: Gerry Brownlee and Breaking Bad.)

(Also, these numbers are completely made up. Though I reckon if you took the street value of P manufactured in a small house, the production per hectare would be pretty spectacular. Just sayin'.)

Hey Gerry. You wanted some rational? Here's some rational.

I got a little excited when the discussion document started talking about rare earth elements like dysprosium, terbium, erbium, ytterbium and unobtainium, but let's look at the actual "mineral wealth" in the conservation areas they want to open up:

Paparoa: Coal, gemstones, gold
Coromandel: Gold-silver, peat
Great Barrier Island: Gold-silver
Otahu: Gold-silver
Parakawai: Gold-silver

GERRY WANTS GOLD.

The problem is that all the reports estimate the value of gold reserves based on current prices. Why is this a problem? Because the real price of gold is currently hovering around a 27-year high (courtesy of The Big Picture):

Gold price tends to spike during times of economic (especially financial) uncertainty. Oh hey, that's us! When the boom times come back, gold prices come back down. So basically, we're digging for stuff that'll almost certainly be worth less by the time it comes out of the ground. (Not worthless, of course, just worth less.)

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And Gerry pulled out this line again (his stock line when talking about mining):

It's also worth noting that in productivity terms, workers in the mining sector return an average of $360,000 of GDP per worker, nearly six times the national average."

Wow, $360,000, that's *heaps*! If we were all miners, we'd all be rich!

No.

Here's what Gerry did. He took the total worth of the mining sector, then divide it by the number of people it employed. It does not mean that more mining = higher productivity. It just means that mining is very capital-intensive and employs relatively few people, which are fairly obvious facts.

The median income for wage and salary earners in mining in 2008 is actually $57,660.

The "output per worker" ("$360,000") is very high because most of the output comes from a) large expensive machines produced by other countries and b) the ground. The worker is not a highly valuable nor highly valued part of the process.

Sure, mining could become a cash-cow for the government, but the kind of “productivity” that Brownlee's talking about does not lead to improved quality of life for New Zealanders. (Unless you're a New Zealander who owns a mining company.)

To be fair, from what I can tell, 80% of mining firms are majority NZ-owned. That's not to say that new entrants into the market will also be NZ-owned, but the characterisation of mining companies as evil multinationals is unfounded. If they are evil, they're locally-owned evil.

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This just seems like such a giant leap backwards. We've spent so many years talking about the knowledge economy, moving up the value chain, selling ideas and knowhow rather than soil nutrients... and now the vision for a more productive New Zealand is digging shit up and cashing it in?

We know exactly why we can't rely on the primary sector in the long-term. The more you squeeze out of the land, the harder you need to squeeze to get the next dollar out. It means that growth becomes harder, and we've said for years that moving up the value chain – agriscience, biotech, etc. – was the way forward.

Value-add! Innovation! Selling ideas! This was what “ambitious for New Zealand” was supposed to be about, right?

So what the hell is this?

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Check out this great piece yesterday by my friend Chye-Ching Huang on the plans for a New Zealand Productivity Council.

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(Also, using "conservation fund = $2-10m over four years = 50% of royalties" to estimate how much the government stands to gain is deeply unreliable. The $2-10m figure is just an arbitrary cap, and there's nothing to suggest that royalties will *actually* be within this range. My bet is that the revenue impact estimate of mining royalties is currently "mehdunno". OIAing this now...)